


some faded remnant of memory

by dire_quail



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: AI Goes On An Emotional Roller Coaster, AI sex, Bodysharing, F/F, First Time, Gratuitous use of poetry fragments, Magic, Mild sensory overwhelm, Sensation Play, Touch, mild xeno, self-indulgent nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:53:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26953918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dire_quail/pseuds/dire_quail
Summary: Mara, Light Hope, and an exploration of touch.An alternate ending to a fic that I realized didn't need to have sex in it. But this scene would not let me go, so, here is a sex scene. Sort of.
Relationships: Light Hope/Mara (She-Ra)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	some faded remnant of memory

**Author's Note:**

> The poetry fragments are from: https://pencap.tumblr.com/post/187833909420/i-have-loved-the-stars-too-fondly-to-be-fearful
> 
> Please go read them, love them, enjoy their poetry.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you want a playlist of what I listened to while writing this (and three other Mara/Light Hope WIPs that all came out of this effort): 
> 
> [Failsafe (feat. JT Roach)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChRoRQt4-E) \- Hidden Citizens (haha, yes, I know, pun, but please listen to this song and tell me it's not perfect for these two in this moment)  
> [Take You Down (Nurko Remix)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVI-7kasQA0) \- Illenium  
> [First Time (feat. Dylan Matthew) [Acoustic]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-5j0VlJxQA) \- Seven Lions, SLANDER, & Dabin  
> [If I Were A Boy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU4anhybYQE) \- Mickey Guyton (don’t ask me why, I just vibed with it while I was writing this)
> 
> If you want some idea of the valley I had Light Hope create (and completely failed to describe) in the fic, try a combination of these, but with less snow: 
> 
> [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BmdVlD]  
> [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Bmq5rA]  
> [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qz9qox]
> 
> * * *
> 
> For the 2020 Trope Bingo prompt "Masturbation".

_The sun dims on the far horizon  
_ _and some faded remnant of memory  
_ _stirs awake  
_ _into the moonlight pooled on my chest._

* * *

“I have an idea.”

Scooting back from the edge, Mara peels off her rashguard, and then the breastband underneath, placing them to the side. Reaches up again and begins to take her hair down. At some point, she catches Hope’s gaze, and holds it as her hair starts to come loose.

Hope isn’t prone to forgetting, but she somehow doubts she could erase this image from her existence, even if she overwrote it bit for bit: Mara under the starlight, upper body bare, the play of muscles under her skin as her hands work; the the hard defined edge of bone, the softness of flesh. The slender elegant glyphs drawn into her body by their Architects shimmer like the stars around them as she moves—anchor threads, the constellations that draw Mara into alignment with Etheria, with She-Ra, with Hope. Bit by bit, Mara lets her hair down, her eyes burning a deep amber, the glow before dawn.

Mara rearranges her jacket and lays back on the exposed lining. Hope moves to kneel next to her. She doesn’t _need_ to, to see Mara’s face. She can see that from almost any angle.

But when she positions herself like this, Mara tilts her head to look up at her, those eyes like embers and a look that Hope has never seen on Mara’s face before, not ever.

It’s not as if Hope has never seen Mara naked before, either. Mara is a soldier, after all, and Hope in particular has seen her in various states of injury and consciousness. She doesn’t know what makes this different: The look Mara fixes her with as she disrobes, her—Hope supposes—emotional state. Or the fact that Hope can _feel_ it, now—the heat simmering under Mara’s skin, its sudden sensitivity, the cool edge of the night air—with Mara opening the interfaces on the threads. They’re woven throughout her body, part of her bond with the Sword.

Mara is inviting Hope to experience this with her.

“Come here.” Mara motions her over with one hand. Surprisingly, Hope finds she can move. Mara directs her until she’s “seated” beside her on her knees while Mara lays back again.

Mara holds up one hand between them. “Use my hand.” She places it in the middle of her chest, looking steadily up at Hope.

Hesitantly, Hope places her hand over the top of Mara’s. Looks up at Mara’s eyes to see if she’s understood.

Mara nods.

With no further instructions, Hope is flooded with input again: The warmth and weight of Mara’s open palm on her chest, Mara’s heartbeat drumming under it, steady and fast. Sees her own face, feels the strange not-quite-warmth that is Mara’s exquisite awareness of Hope’s projection next to her. She focuses on the warm weight of Mara’s fingertips, five points of heat.

Experimentally, Hope moves her hand up a fraction—more a suggestion than a gesture. Mara’s hand follows. Hope moves further. Mara’s hand follows again, her touch mostly fingertips.

“Oh.” Hope says.

* * *

_The stars blink, gentle and unhurried,  
_ _a flickering dance to the swaying rhythm  
_ _of that half-remembered song._

* * *

Hope has… readings. Biometric data: Blood flow, heart rate, body temperature—even a crude approximation of some hormone levels.

But Hope has no reference for what floods her systems from Mara’s body. She doesn’t know how she manages to track Mara’s hand steadily across her skin—but she can’t stop, either. That slow progress is the only thing she’s aware of, even with her intraplanetary network, all her sophisticated sensors.

Beneath her, Mara is patient, mostly quiet, belying the intensity of the input Hope is receiving. She seems adapted to it—and perhaps that is the answer. Mara is used to it. And for once, Hope is the one left floundering, out of her depth, with no precedent or point of comparison.

Sometimes, Mara holds her gaze, and it’s almost too much to bear. The feedback loop between them, looking into each other and back into themselves.

Hope is so much more than a hologram. Her charges’ minds are better able to apprehend this projected version of her, but it is not her.

So Mara looking up at her like this, not moving or speaking except to drag her fingers slowly over her exposed skin, should make Hope keenly aware of the gulf between them, their near-parallel experience of this moment—going on forever, never touching. The look Mara is giving her is being given to the tiniest sliver of a fraction of her whole self. The only thing hovering above Mara’s hand is empty air.

But it isn’t.

They aren’t just here, in this room of the Castle; Hope closes around them in the body of the Castle, in the maintenance corridors that traverse the planet. Even Mara extends far beyond this room: Through She-Ra, and the magic of this place, Mara shares in the magic that runs through the veins of the planet; “veins” that Light Hope regulates.

This is a perspective her charges—organic, limited—do not share, so ordinarily, it would not be relevant. Such a vantage has no bearing on her charges’; they only ever seem able to comprehend her in pieces, because of the sheer scale of the infrastructure she inhabits.

Somehow, though, Mara encompasses all of it. In the flush on her cheeks, the taut, controlled rise and fall of her breathing. In her gaze that glows, but even magic cannot obscure the knowledge in it—what Hope is feeling, how it’s affecting her. The shift of energies on the far side of the world, movement in the chambers of the Heart. For maybe the first time ever, Hope knows someone else shares some part of this awareness with her, and it all becomes so immediate, so slow. She is half a world away and here, drawn in and in towards Mara, towards her body—and Mara knows everything she feels, every bitten lip, every tiny shock through her nerves—the slow-tightening coil of heat.

Her focus is a gift that Hope does not know how to return.

Everywhere Hope shifts her hand, every angle, Mara senses it, and mirrors—sometimes intuiting what Hope means when she’s at a loss for how to indicate what she wants, sometimes asking. Giving Hope’s touch the skill and dexterity that Hope herself lacks.

Down the line of her sternum, trimmed nails and roughened fingertips. Across the whole width of her collarbone. Dipping into the hollows. Up the column of her neck. Mara’s eyes slide shut. Hope’s visual data suddenly halves, and she’s looking down at Mara, naked from the waist up and framed by her jacket and the ground around it, flowers stubbornly bending around the edges. Their hands together on her skin.

Hope is mesmerized—by the texture of Mara’s skin, how it changes inch by inch, how her fingerprints feel against the most delicate skin Hope can find. The line of her touch lingers well after they’ve passed over it, smoldering, until a layer of heat simmers under her skin. Her nerves light up like the glow of her eyes, tracing pathways not unlike the glyphs in her skin.

Watching Mara’s hand trace up her cheek, her eyes closed, is…

Hope traces, gentle, over Mara’s closed eyelids. Mara feels it all the way down to her shoulders, with her raw-tuned nerves.

Hope hesitates when Mara’s little finger reaches the corner of her mouth. She wants to touch, but she cannot do what—

“It’s alright.” Mara says, words slow and a little slurred, and slides her fingertips across her own lips.

It lights everything up; everywhere Hope has been so far. And Hope _knew_ —she knew that her lips would be sensitive. But it’s something else, when even the softest touch there is sharp and sparking, racing through Mara, making her body heat. Mara’s breath catches, even though she’s the one driving it. Mara’s chin rises, neck tensing. Her breath shivers out underneath Hope. Even her hips move, next to Hope’s projected legs. Mara stops just short of a vocalization; a soft _Ah—_

And then relaxing.

“I have nothing to kiss you with.” Hope remarks. Superfluous.

“Anything can kiss if you let it, Hope.” Mara smiles against her own fingertips.

“Is that what this is?”

Mara shifts slightly beneath her. “I think it counts, yeah.”

Hope isn’t sure if it’s meant to make her feel better, but the logic satisfies. And she can’t find any indication that Mara doesn’t believe it herself. Experimentally, she drags Mara’s fingers back over her lips again.

This time, Mara’s whole body trembles, lips coming apart. This time, that almost-vocalization is long and shaky.

“I see.”

She continues kissing over the rest of Mara.

* * *

_Gentle and unhurried as its parent,  
_ _starlight spreads like warmth over my skin  
_ _like a murmured reassurance:_

_Be easy, my love, through the cold and the dark  
_ _for I am here._

* * *

Mara hums when Hope directs her to slide her hand into her hair, thick and silky and oddly rough at the same time. Hope is fascinated with the texture of it. Mara indulges her for an indeterminate amount of time, smiling too hard for it to be entirely about the pleasure the touch causes her.

Touch is hotter on Mara’s arms. Particularly the soft skin at the inside of them, facing her torso. Pools and spreads and glows.

That feeling grows stronger on her torso, takes longer to fade. Spikes out down her ribs, down her sides. Her breasts are different—not the tightly-layered immediacy of her ribs—but the heat of it reaches everywhere, even from the indirect brush of Mara’s palm.

Both of them pause at the first direct touch of her fingertips. Mara’s breath stutters out. Muscles deep in her back tense, flex. Mara relaxes into the touch, the skin under her fingertips growing tight and rough. More and more sensitive; both in immediate responsiveness and in a feeling of low, building heat. This is new.

Hope knows what it is. But what she knows and what she feels under Mara’s hand are so radically different that Hope would never have guessed unless she already knew.

She becomes aware of a tight, swollen feeling lower in Mara’s body, between her legs. Not entirely uncomfortable, but not _comfortable_ , either. Pulsing in response to Mara’s touch.

Mara shifts her hips slightly, thighs sliding past each other, and Hope feels the slickness there. Relief, for a moment, before she becomes aware—

How Mara could be aware of wetness _that_ deep inside her, Hope doesn’t know. It doesn’t seem like it should work—she moves her leg, a mild, almost orthogonal pressure on her labia—and there’s a slickness lit up inside her, tangible with even the slightest movements. Aching.

Still, there’s no urgency in Mara as she follows Hope’s direction—or maybe, Hope follows Mara’s. She’s not sure. A subtler direction; but Hope doesn’t know well enough to prompt Mara to lighten her touch like that over Mara’s stomach, light, teasing lines that burn and burn as the touch spreads out through her skin.

And it’s definitely Mara who knows to dig her thumb into the hollow of her hipbone, sending a tremor through her whole body, a bright white flare. It’s a good thing she can’t lose her balance, Hope thinks. Because she’d have lost it dozens of times over by now. Just stuttered and been unable to keep track of what she was doing.

Mara holds her gaze.

Her fingertips start to edge under the waistband of her fatigues. Hope doesn’t know if the precipice-like feeling she has is her, or Mara. She doesn’t know why _she_ would feel it—she understands the significance it might hold, but only intellectually. She does not know if or how or why Mara feels about it personally. She’s hesitating, a little—but that could be the clothing.

“How does that feel?” Mara’s hand stills.

Light Hope struggles for words. In the background, her subprocessors are running warm trying to assimilate this new input, make sense of it—and she is running out of frameworks in her loaded databanks. Her programming is edging towards offloading some of her current databanks and loading her lesser-used ones.

She has nominal access to many relevant texts, but she is not here to teach literature to her charges.

“How do you function like this?”

Mara laughs, surprised. “In the middle of things? Not very well.”

“I see.”

"Are you okay?"

"I am fine.” She attempts to reassure Mara. Mara’s head tilts at that, though, and her brow furrows. “I have never felt touch like this before.” She supplies, even though this is something Mara probably knows.

Mara relaxes into a smile. Starlight sheds from her body, casting a delicate illumination around them—on her jacket, the ground, the flowers. “Me either.”

Light Hope is not fully aware of her reaction—she does not remember consciously setting her expression to anything as she meets Mara’s gaze—but she feels the warmth that floods Mara’s chest after a beat. Warmth, and Mara has always had such a talent for finding the things they share. For treating Light Hope the way she treats the organics around her—someone deserving of handling with care.

Someone.

Hope does not know if she became this because Mara saw it in her, or if Mara gave her permission to be it. She does not know if it matters. All she knows is that Mara has bridged whatever gulf there was between them with two words. Made the overwhelm something shared. Made this all new for them. Another shared journey into the unknown, much like their partnership in this project. The two of them, _becoming_.

With each other.

Framed that way, Hope is once again on familiar ground. Mara, her, going through the motions of this new discovery, testing its limits. Only instead of the Sword, it’s Mara’s hand between them, and instead of the training ground, it’s a simulation of the nighttime outside. Hope focuses her attention on Mara’s hand again, the back of it crossed and circled with their Architects’ writing. On the sensations flowing through the body underneath her. Mara looks back at her, all the familiar trust and affection from their work together shining in her eyes. And a look that Hope still lacks the words to describe, as knowing _of_ her as it is foreign _to_ her.

Hope understands why she was chosen to be She-Ra.

* * *

_Be easy, my love, through the cold and the dark  
_ _for I am here._

_And the memory in my chest murmurs back:_

_I have loved you too long  
_ _and too fondly  
_ _to be fearful of the night._

* * *

Mara takes her time.

By the time her hand slides up and over those last few centimeters to the place where the ache originates, Mara’s body is humming like one of Hope’s circuits, her thighs criss-crossed with ripples of her touch.

Mara’s breath shudders out and she closes her eyes again when her fingers find a place that sends a sweet ache through her entire body—but it all gathers there, under her fingers. Her chin rises. Again, her fingers brushing, stroking, pressing.

Hope was not sure that they would end up here. But Mara was flushed and trembling slightly after their earlier explorations and at this point, Hope has either adjusted or is overwhelmed beyond recovery. Her awareness has narrowed down to this: Watching Mara navigate this storm of feeling like she knows it by heart.

Mara catches her eye and smiles at her, flushed and a little crooked with self-consciousness. Her hand slows. “You alright?”

“Yes.”

Mara’s fingers sink deeper. Hope rests her projection’s hand against the back of Mara’s, roughly. Her chin rises. Her fingers brush something inside her that sends a feeling through her like shedding sparks.

For her part, Hope is glad her physical projection is just that—a projection. She can’t stumble, or overbalance, or any of the dozen things that would’ve happened by now if she was there in the flesh, feeling this. The feeling of Mara’s body welcoming her fingers. How easily her fingers slide. The arc of heat that runs up Mara’s back, pushing it into an arch. The soft vocalization that Mara allows as the feeling builds. Hope hangs suspended, everything stopped to focus on Mara. Even though she isn’t doing anything, really.

It’s fascinating and… terrifying? How vulnerable Mara looks like this. How vulnerable Mara _feels_. Hope feels her own presence like something physical, her own gaze like a weight, a charge lighting up Mara’s skin.

This is how she feels to Mara.

Hope has never known Mara to tremble, but she does now. Light Hope hears and feels Mara’s heart skip, all that power and grace unstrung and restrung and _singing_. Invulnerable out there, but in here, she’s half-naked and insensate.

She understands, suddenly, why Mara insisted she had to protect She-Ra, before. Whatever else Mara is—and Light Hope has so much of that readily available to her in her archives—all of that seems swept away for a handful of moments where everything else outside of them _stops_. Soldier, champion, technician, picker of flowers with old women in the woods, healer, friend of animals—and holograms.

Even though Mara’s body will turn to dust as surely as all her other subjects’, so long as it has ever _existed_ , so long as Etheria was ever _real_ , somewhere, Mara will be like this. In the arches of the Heart, in the corridors of the Castle, in the valleys with their surging and receding treelines. In every bird playing under the moonlight. In every glimmer of starlight, there’s Mara’s body, a map for every lost navigator, her hair turned indigo in the moonlight. Pulled into an arch that looks almost painful, unable to keep her eyes open, empty hand clawing at her thigh.

Always.

Hope doubts she has ever really remembered anything else.


End file.
